


Googling Guert Affenlight

by lonelywalker



Category: The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach
Genre: Age Difference, Baseball, Books, Canon Character of Color, Coming Out, LGBTQ Themes, M/M, Older Man/Younger Man, Teenage sexuality, Walt Whitman - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-29
Updated: 2013-05-29
Packaged: 2017-12-13 07:52:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/821834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>14-year-old Owen knows he’s gay but is terrified of anyone else finding out, especially the guys on his high school baseball team. Then he finds a book called <i>The Sperm-Squeezers</i>.</p><p>Spoilers for the novel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Googling Guert Affenlight

Owen’s first mistake was to actually hit the ball.

High school was tough, his friends said, and the evidence seemed to correlate with their anecdotes. Hundreds of teenagers, hormones raging, desperate both to carve out their own identities while somehow simultaneously _fitting in_. In middle school Owen had mostly hung out with other studious kids and ignored everyone else. The plan here was to do pretty much the same thing: keep his head down, study hard, and try not to get dunked in any toilets.

This plan had been working exceptionally well until second period. Gym class. Baseball.

Unlike several of his asthmatic friends, Owen had no physical restrictions on athletic activity. He simply preferred, if at all possible, to read instead, which was usually just fine with the coaches. Baseball, though, he could stomach. There was a certain strategy, a certain finesse to the game you couldn’t find in football or basketball or track. Plus, most of the team spent most of the game sitting around doing nothing. And there were pockets in the uniforms.

When his turn at bat came, though, Owen calmly took up his position in the left-handed batter’s box, breathed out, and hit the ball straight back over the pitcher’s left shoulder, narrowly missing his ear. He was already at first base before the teacher called him back. “Hey… what’s your name?”

“Owen Dunne.”

“Yeah… try that again.”

This time the teacher pitched and Owen, aware he was being tested, aware that nothing good would ever come of the skinny nerd exhibiting sporting prowess, smacked the ball just as he had before. This time, the teacher had to duck.

“Tryouts,” the teacher said to him after class. “Show up here after the final bell.”

***

When he’d been little, after his father left, Owen’s mom had taken him to the batting cages on the weekends. It was both making up for the little time she was able to spend with him and the lack of any major male influence in his life now that his grandfather was in a nursing home. 

Although – she pointed out – it wasn’t as if anyone actually _required_ a male influence. “The important thing, O, is you have good influences. Male or female, black or white, whatever or whatever. Now relax your shoulder and hit that ball.”

He became a regular starter on the high school team, his batting making up for his usually apathetic performances in right field. So few balls were hit out that way that he simply grew bored and focused on other things, like school papers and naps. Most of the rest of the team were jocks, kids who’d leapfrogged into puberty and apparent buckets of testosterone. They lived to run laps, to head to the gym after school even though the coach told them it was a dumb thing to do at thirteen, fourteen. All the training Owen did was to show up.

At first, he’d expected the other guys would treat him like they would treat any kid who looked and acted the way he did – knocking off his glasses, tossing his books in the air. But he was on the team and he wasn’t the worst player by far, so, apart from some ribbing in the shower – which was nothing compared to what the senior team said laughingly about every single one of them – he got on fine.

“What’s the history homework?” Dushawn asked, towel around his waist as he flopped down onto the bench where Owen was tying his shoes.

“Chapters four through seven, questions at the back.”

“Right. Crap.” He cycled his shoulder. “Your arm ever get heavy? I heard pitchers get those cuff injuries, you know? But at twenty-five or something.”

Owen wiped steam from his glasses. “You’re probably tensing up too much. You should go to yoga.” He’d been going with his mom, and then without her, for years.

Dushawn blinked. “Yoga? That’s some dumbass mystic faggot shit right there.”

“You’re absolutely right. We’re all dumbass mystic faggots. But our shoulders don’t hurt.” Owen zipped up his gym bag and got up. “See you tomorrow.”

“Owen?”

He turned back. Dushawn was a little older than him, already had stubble coming in rather than zits, but his eyes were wide like a kid’s now. “You really gay?”

Owen shrugged. “It’s perfectly normal during puberty to have sexual feelings about everyone from Britney to a chair leg. I’ll see how it all shakes out.”

Dushawn chewed on his lower lip. He looked like he wanted to say something. “Yeah,” he said finally. “See you tomorrow.”

No one was home when Owen got there, walking from the bus stop. His mother had a meeting until late, would be fuming when she got home, with only a few hours to sleep until she was expected to get up for her hair and makeup calls. He threw his kit into the laundry and turned on the washer, going upstairs to do homework. On his shelves were several volumes of Whitman – he’d found one in the library a few summers ago and been so enthusiastic that Genevieve had bought him the Complete Works for his birthday. He pulled out a slimmer volume, sat on his bed, and flipped through it.

For years simply holding a book, feeling it in his hands and being drawn into the intrinsic calmness of words on a page, had given him the freedom he often sought from the whirlwind of life. Now he stopped and mouthed words silently to himself: “How you settled your head athwart my hips, and gently turned over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stripped heart…”

Had Whitman ever taken group showers with other teenagers? Had he ever been eager to cover up an aching, inconvenient boner that just wouldn’t go away? It was normal, Owen told himself. Teenagers and even grown men had erections that had nothing to do with stimulation or erotic thoughts. It was just the body’s misfirings, or the evolutionary need to procreate making itself known.

Still… When he lay back on his bed and slid a hand down inside his jeans, inside his briefs, it was nothing but pleasant to think of Dushawn’s muscled shoulders, his slim waist, the trail of hair curling down to his groin. And, yes, his cock, exactly what even the most fervently heterosexual boy would never want to be caught looking at in the locker room, no matter how often they compared sizes.

He cleaned himself up afterward with tissues and threw his briefs in the laundry basket. He should’ve waited to turn on the washer. Whitman, he reflected, had almost certainly never had these problems.

***

“Hey Owen!”

It was the high school fair, an annual event ostensibly raising money for textbooks or sports equipment or some other worthy cause, but generally a good excuse for all attendees to eat cotton candy and chuck balls at coconuts. Owen had been manning the book stall most of the afternoon, taking nickels and occasionally dollars for beaten-up paperbacks. Some he’d secreted in his own bag as soon as he’d seen what was on offer.

The rest of the team were around, mostly tagging after team captain Braden and hooting at girls. Owen nodded and smiled and went back to his books. Dushawn was the only one whose shadow ever fell across the table.

“Hi,” Owen said. “Grisham? Harris? Crichton?”

Dushawn did at least look. “How long you on here for?”

“Probably another half an hour. Forty-five minutes.” Pretty soon the crowds would start to disperse, the food running out, feet getting sore. But he still needed to help the teachers pack the remaining books away.

“Yeah? Think after we can do a bit of practice? Maybe you can show me some of that yoga stuff.”

“Sure,” Owen said.

“Cool.” Dushawn slapped down a dollar. “I’ll take that crime one there. My dad digs that shit.”

There were plenty of fantasies to be had about the prospect of meeting him later. Owen had seen his share of indie movies and TV episodes where the big burly sports star turned out to be a severely closeted gay man. Perhaps they’d practice for a while and then flop down, sweaty and worn out, in the shade of the school building. In the early evening, there would be no one left but them on the school property. So Owen would calmly, casually reach over and start stroking him, as though he’d given a hundred hand jobs before and it was no big deal, right? Just one straight guy helping another straight guy out. And if he eased down Dushawn’s pants, leaned in and closed his mouth around him… Well, in reality he’d probably choke. 

No, in reality he’d never even make a move. He’d look at his watch as soon as Dushawn suggested they take a break. He’d say, “gotta go, my mom’s called me three times already”, the phone allegedly buzzing in his pocket. It didn’t matter whether Dushawn was straight or gay, or someone who slept with girls but liked being blown by anyone with a mouth. What mattered was enjoying being on the team more than he cared about being who he was.

This was a good school, a private school, populated mostly by the kids of the well-off middle classes and some scholarship students. Owen’s mom was a TV anchor. Dushawn’s dad was something impressive in the music industry. Half their parents never showed up to games: too busy in surgery or court, trading stocks, fronting ad campaigns. His classmates, teammates, were privileged, better educated than the average, in an overwhelmingly liberal state. But being the nerdy, bookworm guy on the team was tolerated if he kept his batting average up. He could be Derek Jeter and still get dropped so hard he’d bounce if he was the gay guy. There was probably some high school somewhere with gay guys on the teams, maybe not even very far from San Jose. But it wasn’t this school.

He’d wrestled it out with himself more times than he could count over the past year. What he’d told Dushawn was true: plenty of straight people developed same-sex crushes during adolescence. So maybe he wasn’t even gay. And even if he was, the smart thing would be to wait it out until he went to a nice liberal arts college where he could join the drama club and never even have to _say_ it before he was kissing some guy. Lots of kids didn’t date during high school, didn’t kiss anyone, didn’t have sex. Even if he did do those things, it would probably be awful and stupid, and he’d lose anyone he actually liked in a few years anyway.

Owen was very good at making rational arguments. He was no good at all when it came to believing them.

***

The book was at the bottom of his bag, obscured by ex-library editions of Shakespeare and TS Eliot. He’d swiped it from the book stall for fifty cents before anyone could even see what he was picking up. It mostly blended in with everything else – an old hardcover, the dustjacket ragged around the edges, the blue and silver picture showing rowers on a choppy sea. But the title, _The Sperm-Squeezers_ , was something no teenager could leave alone.

The copy on the inside jacket discussed _Moby-Dick_ and the Transcendentalists, a movement about which Owen knew very little, even if he’d read _Moby-Dick_ that very year, had seen some mini-series years before that. The book, though, was a somewhat academic study of the letters written by nineteenth century American writers, and their homosocial, possibly homoerotic content. _Old white men_ , Owen had thought, but it had mentioned Whitman alongside Hawthorne and Melville, Emerson and Thoreau, and that had made it worth a dollar.

He paged through it now, removing an ancient bookmark and forgotten shopping list. The author’s name was Guert Affenlight, which seemed Dutch or German to Owen’s eye, but the bio on the back fold of the jacket said he was from Wisconsin, and now – meaning as of 1987 – taught at Harvard. “Affenlight” seemed simple enough, but how did you pronounce his first name? Gurt? Goort? Gwert? Well, he could probably Google the guy later.

There was an already tall and wobbly stack of books to one side of his bed, painstakingly ordered in terms of his reading schedule for school and pleasure. But he lay back with this one, just to see whether the content justified the outrageous title. After the first few pages, he knew it did more than that.

“O?” Genevieve was home, rattling around downstairs. “Did you eat already?”

He looked up and adjusted his glasses before looking at his watch. Had he eaten? No. He hadn’t even showered after practicing. On the other hand, he was a good third through the book, his mind’s eye deep in spermaceti.

They ordered in Thai and ate it at the table, which was a rule of Genevieve’s even before Owen’s father had departed from the family picture. Home cooking or takeout, banquet or sandwiches, if they were both home they had to spend dinner time together.

“What’s that you’re reading?”

Owen had deliberately placed it by his carton of noodles. “It’s a study of nineteenth century letters.”

She pulled it over with a finger. “ _The Sperm-Squeezers_. Is this what the sex-crazed youth of today is into?” She flipped to the front inside jacket, then the back. “Well, well. Now isn’t he a looker.”

Guert Affenlight, however you said his name, was apparently a bearded white guy with slightly shaggy, absent-minded professor hair, and a very nice smile. Well, at least he had been in 1987.

“I got it at school,” he said, which sounded like an excuse. “I think it’s fascinating how close-knit the world of literature was those days – at least, literature written largely by white men.” Genevieve tended to point this out if he didn’t himself. “And that such great minds knew each other so well. Emerson and Thoreau, for example. How many friends are equally brilliant?”

“You’ll find some equally brilliant friends soon enough,” Genevieve said.

“It’s not about me.”

“Owen, your perspective is always about you. So will you please explain the title in a PG-13 manner?”

He smiled. “It’s nothing to do with porn. It’s a _Moby-Dick_ reference.”

“And you’re claiming that a book named _Moby-Dick_ has nothing to do with porn?”

“Precisely Affenlight’s point in the book. The very fact Melville, an ostensibly straight man living in a very homophobic time, wrote about men sharing a bed and engaging in the squeezing of spermaceti, which is one of the more obvious examples of a metaphor for mutual masturbation-”

Genevieve cleared her throat. “And this is an academic text?”

“Sort of. A bit popularized. Look, it got great reviews in _Time_ and _The New York Times_.”

“Uh huh.” She pushed it back. “Pass the beef. I know you’re not going to eat it.”

***

Owen waited until he’d read _The Sperm-Squeezers_ cover to cover before turning to Google. There was no point in reading reviews and critical debate – if there even were any articles online from that far back – when he hadn’t yet formed any opinions of his own. What he found was much too little to appease his newfound appetite: Guert Affenlight had published articles and book reviews, but no other works on anything like the scale of _The Sperm-Squeezers_. His Wikipedia page mentioned that he’d risen to being the head of Harvard’s English department before being appointed president of Westish College in Wisconsin. Owen had to look up the Wiki page for Westish too. And then consult a map.

The idea of a feted Harvard professor suddenly decamping to a tiny college in the middle of nowhere suggested some sort of scandal: plagiarism, affairs with students. But there weren’t even any rumors. No one seemed to have a bad word to say about the man. Owen experimentally typed in “Guert Affenlight” + “gay” (he’d written a book called _The Sperm-Squeezers_ after all). It led him precisely nowhere.

YouTube yielded a couple of clips of interest – an old, grainy lecture on Melville and Nietzsche someone had videotaped at Harvard, and a more recent promotional clip from the Westish College marketing department, which Owen assumed amounted to one person. The Guert Affenlight in that clip was at least fifteen years older than the man on the book cover, but he’d lost the beard and gained a tidier head of silver-gray hair. In what could easily have been an awkward interview, Affenlight was good-humored, charismatic, and more at ease with public speaking than most actors Owen saw on TV. And at least now he knew how to say Affenlight’s first name, not that he’d ever probably need to use it.

After that, he spent an hour on Amazon, ordering Melville’s other novels, his letters, Emerson and Thoreau’s journals, and a dozen other things until the total crept up above even what Genevieve was probably willing to let him spend on books. And then he started the book over, pencil in hand, notepad on his knee.

Perhaps in three years, when he was applying to colleges, he’d have found other, better role models and almost forgotten about Westish. It was a safety school, he’d found out: beautiful scenery, competent lecturers, but nothing setting the world ablaze. With luck he’d have good enough grades to impress the Ivy League, let alone the second and third ranks of schools that came before Westish. But for now there was something tempting about applying there, even as a just-in-case safety school, and being able to talk with Guert Affenlight on his own level.

And yet, there was more to the world than a selection of American nineteenth century white people with possible homoerotic tendencies. He had the whole of time and space to cover in terms of literary tradition. Until now, his reading had been extensive but with no particular direction, concentrated on whatever he happened to pick up at the store or the library. Now he had a purpose, the entire world of fiction was spread out before him. There was a lot to get done in three years. So much to read, to absorb, to critique. 

Quitting the baseball team would be an obvious step. There was no way he was going to get a sports scholarship, and he didn’t particularly want or need one. It was taking up time he could spend on his studies, time he could actually be himself. There had to be other gay people at his school, just based on simple statistics, or at least others willing to discuss literature, to wax lyrical about Whitman and happily come with him to the city’s indie theater productions.

But… he _liked_ baseball, _liked_ the team even if most of them couldn’t approach his exam scores. The value of sports couldn’t be measured the same way you assessed knowledge and analysis of literature. It promoted health, fraternity, strategic thinking, stress relief. Whitman had praised the game. Even Affenlight, he’d mentioned in that clip, had played college football. Only a few hours every week, and he could read on the bench for half that time…

***

 _You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul._ Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851. Hero worship, an intense friendship, or intense sexual longing? Without consummation, did it matter?

Owen had taken to bringing _The Sperm-Squeezers_ to baseball practice with him, which meant taking it almost everywhere with him, tucked into his bag like a touchstone. It served as a reference guide for most of his other reading, but it was also nice just to turn to a page and read Affenlight’s easy prose, to suddenly understand a fragment of sly wit after reading _Walden_ or Emerson’s _Nature_. Affenlight was like a professor and a friend on call at the touch of his fingertips, and maybe a therapist too. He couldn’t respond to Owen’s questions, of course – although Owen had occasionally thought about emailing him at his public Westish address – but he could help Owen answer them himself.

“What’s that?” Dushawn asked. 

Owen showed him the cover.

“Seriously?” Dushawn pulled out the neck of his jersey and sniffed. “It’s about jacking off?”

“Only figuratively. Well, mostly figuratively.”

“Sounds kind of gay, man.”

“Yeah,” Owen agreed. “Kind of.”

As the spring wound on, the team continued in its steadily average performance and Owen’s grades crept even higher than they had before. The tower of books by his bed was now a fort. Genevieve might cast him the occasional troubled look, but she knew well by now that her son was hardly intended for MLB, or to be one of the popular kids who hung out around bars. 

He spent a lot of time thinking about Affenlight, and about Whitman and the other men in the book, and then about the men in _their_ books, plays, and poetry. Perhaps none of them had ever had to come out. Most of them wouldn’t know what “come out” meant, what “homosexuality” meant, wouldn’t comprehend it even if you told them. Sodomy was an act, not an identity. And if you wanted other men, you certainly didn’t broadcast it to the world, not unless you could pretend you were talking about whales or dress it in sufficiently flowery language. How did you find a lover in those days? Probably the same way as you did as an out gay man today – say hi to someone and hope you didn’t get rejected or thrown in jail.

“Mom,” Owen said over their next takeout meal: Indian, this time. “You know that I’m gay, don’t you?”

Genevieve paused, fork halfway to her mouth. Owen watched her breathe. “O, I love you. But am I going to be facing a lecture about stereotypes if I say yes?”

He hugged her the way he used to, when he was a kid unfazed by the questionable decorum of tightly holding onto one’s mother. The hug lasted, as Genevieve held him just as tightly, stroking his hair, her little boy again.

“Do you think I have to tell him?” Owen asked once he’d edged back into his own chair. Who _he_ was went without saying.

Genevieve picked up her loaded fork again. “Darling, you don’t have to tell anyone anything. Although,” she said with at least half a smile, “if he finds out in fifteen, twenty years when you send him a wedding invitation, that would be just fine with me.”

If coming out to his mother had been nerve-wracking, and the idea of coming out to his absent father made him sick to his stomach, mentioning anything about it to the team was on another plane altogether. His other school friends just shrugged, hugged him, and asked who he was seeing – but they were ultra-liberal hippies and geeks, not the guys on the team who would be working construction in a few years, or joining the military, or trading stocks in a boiler room. Not that there was anything inherently bad or homophobic about any of those professions. Or about baseball. 

“Give them a chance,” Genevieve had said. “They gave you one.”

Which was fine and reasonable in as far as it went. Except that the worst case scenario didn’t just mean being shunned. It meant not being on the team anymore. It possibly meant being pummeled in the corridors and shoved down stairs. Thoreau, Owen suspected, had never exactly suffered from that problem. But if he’d loved Emerson fiercely, he’d also been a geek of his time, a self-made outcast from the trappings of civilization. He wouldn’t even have cared about being rejected, because he’d already rejected them.

But, even with all the respect he had for Thoreau, Owen _didn’t_ want to spend his life by a pond. He didn’t want to reject society or be rejected by it. He wanted friends, a boyfriend, true love. He wanted to be on the team, and he wanted to be himself while he did it. Was that so much to ask?

They were playing at home on a Saturday morning, lots of yawning boys throwing on their jerseys, tying their laces, talking crap about the opposing team. Owen was deliberately late.

“Dunne, hurry the fuck up!” Braden, the team captain, was already eyerolling. 

Owen dumped his bag on the bench by Dushawn. “I’ve got to ask you all something.”

“Can it wait?”

“No.” He was surprised by how calm he sounded. He didn’t feel that way at all. “I need to know if any of you have a problem with having a gay man on your team. Because if you do, Josh here better start warming up.”

Josh, the second-string right-fielder, popped the bubblegum he was chewing. Everyone else was mostly looking at him in silence, a few explaining to their inattentive friends exactly what he’d just said.

Owen looked around. He’d expected someone would’ve at least thrown something by now.

“You’re a fag?” Braden asked. “A homo?”

“Yes. Yes I am.”

“The guy we’ve been taking showers with.”

“Believe me, none of you have anything I don’t have.”

Braden spun the tip of his bat on the floor. He looked down. For a moment, despite his height, despite the muscles, he looked every inch the indecisive fourteen-year-old he was. And the rest of the team was waiting for him, for his approval or condemnation. 

Next to Owen, Dushawn stood up. “I don’t care if he’s a fucking pineapple. We need him at bat. You want Joshie to play right field, be my fucking guests, all right? Dunne’s got more balls than the lot of you. And he can hit better too.”

The murmurs of the other players were broken up by the coach. “What’re you all standing around for? Dunne, get your uniform on or it’s burpees from now till April.”

Owen, and the rest of the team, looked at Braden. He adjusted his cap. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “But you better put one or two over the wall today, or we’re all getting screwed in the ass.”

As the coach ran over the starting lineup, Owen unzipped his bag and got changed as quickly as he could. He would’ve liked to text Genevieve, but she was out there somewhere, one in a not-very-substantial crowd. She’d figure out soon enough that he wasn’t black and blue.

Dushawn held out a palm for him to high-five. “We still on for yoga tomorrow night?”

“Dumbass mystic faggot shit?” Owen smiled and slapped his hand. “We absolutely are.”

***

The annual Freshperson Barbecue was traditionally held at Westish College on the day of official registration, in the blissful gap between tearing around classrooms with various baffling bits of paperwork and actually settling in to hopefully learning something in those same rooms. Owen found the note about it in his “So, you’re a Westish student!” booklet and rolled his eyes. “Wonderful. An afternoon of school-sponsored carnivorism, doubtless containing meat that is even _less_ fit for human consumption than usual, prepared by the dining hall’s exploited immigrant labor.”

Henry raised his head from where he was doing battle with the sheets meant to fit his creaking dormitory bed. “You mean like me?”

“Well.” Owen straightened his glasses. “Exploited immigrant _and student_ labor.”

But the view of the barbecue from the window of Phumber 405 was more promising than he had initially thought: tables were set up around the Small Quad, one for each college activity, club, or team. So it wasn’t purely a faux-social gathering focused on the mutual consumption of what was thought to be a universal snack. Henry was already down there, so Owen slung his bag over his shoulder and went to join him.

“There’s tofu!” Henry said immediately. “I know because I had one by accident. Tastes kind of like chicken.”

When Owen rather suspiciously went to fetch a tofu dog from the barbecue, the banner caught his eye. Facing away from Phumber, it looked like a professionally-made rainbow of colors bleeding into one another in an almost psychedelic pattern. On it, in bold white letters, was the name of the club: Westish LGBT. Behind the desk was an almost criminally good-looking young man in a button-down shirt. He seemed a little lonely.

“Your banner’s missing a few letters,” Owen said.

The young man smiled. “They keep adding more. Maybe if we had membership fees I’d be able to do a new one every year. You’re a freshperson?”

“Owen Dunne. Can I have one of your pins?” There was a bowl of rainbow pins and wristbands at one corner of the table. 

“Have two. I’m Jason. Jason Gomes.”

They nodded at each other in solemn recognition.

“Jason – not many takers today?” 

Owen recognized the voice without needing to turn round, and then Guert Affenlight was warmly shaking Jason’s hand. He looked much different than he had when they’d listened to his convocation speech – still in a shirt and tie, but without a jacket, his sleeves rolled up to mid-forearm, a cardboard coffee cup in his left hand. 

Jason smiled. “We’re not exactly the medieval fencing club, sir.”

“Too right you’re not. They’ve drawn a crowd.” Affenlight looked at Owen with interest. “Has Jason dragged you into his colorful web, then?”

“I was born in the colorful web.”

Affenlight, thankfully, grinned and stuck out his free hand. “Guert Affenlight.”

“Owen Dunne.”

“Ah, Owen! I feel as though we’ve already met. Good to put a face to the papers and the phone call. How are you getting along? I was just talking to Mr. Skrimshander. Quiet, isn’t he?”

“He does seem a little shy. When you called, I thought you must be inventing him.”

Affenlight was amused. “It’s the first time I’ve made the acquaintance of a Skrimshander too. But I see he doesn’t have a cannibal for a roommate, if that’s tofu. And cash-strapped as the housing department is, they probably supplied you with your own personal beds.” 

“Yes, thank you.”

“Well, I’ll leave you boys to it. Anything I can do for you, just let me know.”

They watched Affenlight make his way to the next stand, where a group of women were enthusiastically discussing guitars. 

“Have you read Affy’s book?” Jason asked. “I was convinced he was going to turn out to be queer.”

“He’s not?”

“If he is, he’s doing a good job of hiding it. He’s dating a female research professor in the history department. Rumor has it he’s got a daughter somewhere too, but I’ve never seen her.”

Owen took a bite out of his hotdog, pondering whether it was against the college honor code to appreciate the president’s butt quite so much. “Huh.”

“He’s always been supportive of us, though. When I came here there wasn’t an LGBT club at all. I mean, unless you count the drama club, which I don’t. Plenty of gay people _hate_ the theater.”

“I’m a drama major.”

“Yeah…” Jason said. “Me too. But I keep hoping to find a big macho gay linebacker just so I can prove my point.”

Owen shrugged. “I play baseball.”

“Then sit your ass down.” Jason pulled out the empty chair next to him. “There must be at least _one_ other gay or trans person in the new class. I mean, I know this college is tiny and rural, but we don’t all immediately head for California or New York.”

“Actually I came the other way.” Sitting down gave him the chance to neatly align the pin on his bag next to the yin-yang. “So there’s a drama club?”

“Meetings Wednesday nights in the union, one play per semester.” Jason tipped his chair back onto two legs. “After this, how about we have a coffee in Café Oo and I can tell you all about it?”

***

Owen had only ever been to bed with one boy before Guert. It had been nice with Jason, if cramped in his dorm room. At the time it had seemed like commitment, being invited to stay over, to fall asleep after sex without worrying about having to leave afterward. The way things had worked out, it hadn’t been much of a commitment at all once Jason graduated, but it still seemed far better than a couple of snatched hours in Guert’s office.

He’d half assumed, had fully prepared himself for the eventuality, that Guert would balk at the very concept of spending the night together, sharing a bed. So many closeted men only ever wanted furtive oral sex behind locked doors, and if it was a presidential office rather than a restroom, and if Guert had given more blow jobs than Owen had yet returned, the principle remained the same. They couldn’t be a couple in public, at least not the Westish public, but there had to be a way to bridge the gap.

Guert, though, had surprised him in very pleasant ways. He liked to kiss, which Owen had known, but the real intimacy of it had escaped him until they were together, sitting on the edge of a queen-size bed like couples did the world over. Congressmen and evangelists in bathrooms didn’t kiss like Guert did. They probably didn’t go to rural Wisconsin fish-fry restaurants with their lovers either, but there they could have been mistaken for father and son, teacher and student, coach and athlete, no matter that their toes were pressed together beneath the table, or that Owen said, “I want to be naked with you” between forkfuls of lettuce.

But now, as they lay together in the drowsy, dreamy escape of the early morning after slow and sleepy lovemaking that had seemed more or less a dream itself, Guert was nestled against Owen’s side, lazily stroking Owen’s ankle. Owen lay there still, watching Guert’s lighter foot against his darker one, both a little fuzzy at that distance without his glasses. He could just feel Guert breathe, sink his fingers into Guert’s hair. It was almost unreal just how real Guert was this morning.

“I’m sure this will sound phony,” he said finally, and even his voice seemed an unwelcome intruder. “But I’ve been meaning to tell you: I read your book six, seven years ago, and it changed my life.”

A pause. He could feel Guert glance up at him. “Why would that sound phony?”

For three years he’d known Guert as the college president and always known him to be unfailingly sincere. He knew everyone’s names, shook hands and listened with interest no matter what ridiculous problems the average student might have on any particular day. It _had_ to be an act, Owen had reasoned. And to some extent he’d found that it was. In private, Guert was quieter, more hesitant, far more introverted. He wasn’t always cheerful and he didn’t have all the answers. But that sincerity, that honest earnestness, seemed to be him to the core.

“People are always saying ‘that book changed my life!’ when all they really mean is they liked it, or it helped them get over an ex, or that they want to sleep with you.”

Guert smiled and touched his lips to Owen’s shoulder. “Believe me, very few people say that about _The Sperm-Squeezers_ , regardless of the reason.”

“I read your book when I was fourteen. Without that book I would never have heard of Westish College. I wouldn’t have met Henry or Mike or Jason. I likely wouldn’t know who you are, let alone be in bed with you now. I might not even be an out gay man at all. I might not _like_ myself at all. So, yes, your book changed my life.”

“That’s oddly terrifying.” Guert stroked his cheek, lifted himself up enough to kiss Owen on the mouth. “But I’m glad. For all of it. For having you here now. And it’s not phony in the least. I know more than most about having my life changed by a book.”

Owen had only discovered Guert’s tattoo the night before, had been delighted then as much by the reveal of a very unpresidential secret as by the artwork itself. Now he was beginning to glimpse the real, bone-deep meaning of every drop of ink. “Perhaps I should get a tattoo as well.”

“Something from my book? I shudder to think. It’s mostly as many masturbation puns as I thought I could slip by my doctoral committee.”

They kissed again, Guert’s jaw a little stubbly under Owen’s palm. It felt good to kiss him as though, here, in this room, he had the right. He could be as possessive as he wanted. In not much time at all, though, the outside world would beckon.

“Do you think you’ll ever tell anyone?” he asked once Guert had settled back, his head against Owen’s shoulder. “About this?”

“About us?” There was that sincerity again. “I want to. I wish I could tell Pella at least. I’ll have to eventually. But it’s… delicate. Our relationship hasn’t been good in so long, and she just left a marriage to an older man, and she’ll think I’ve been lying to her for her entire life. I don’t know, maybe I have.”

“Speaking from experience, it never seems like the perfect time to come out.”

“It’s not just…” Guert sighed. “Do you think I’m gay?”

Other men, Owen reflected, lying naked in bed with the man who had asked that question, might be tempted to laugh. “No one has the right to put a label on you, Guert.”

“I don’t know whether I’m gay, or bisexual, or whatever sort of straight man falls for another man every sixty years. I have to wonder if Melville felt about Hawthorne the way I feel about you.”

“I hope not, the way it ended.”

Guert’s fingertips were light across his belly. “I don’t know… I wouldn’t want to give up feeling like this, no matter how it ends. If it ends. And I want to read your great masterpiece one day.”

“Believe me, I’m much harder to Google than you are.”

“Is this one of these youth slang things I only find out about once they’re already uncool?” Guert’s hand moved a little lower. “Either way, I look forward to Googling you many more times in the future, Owen Dunne.”

They were going to be late, Owen knew without looking at either of their watches. There were things to do, balls to hit, a team to motivate. But here was Guert, the man who’d been close to his “bare-stripped heart” in some fashion or another for seven years, and perhaps the love he’d always longed to explore.

Owen dropped his head back to the pillow and closed his eyes as Guert’s hand continued to do exquisite things to his body. _Sperm-Squeezers_ indeed, he thought, and let Guert kiss him again.


End file.
